Install SL / Lion on Macbook 4,2?

My brother gave me his old Macbook 4,2 for me to use for school since my laptop died earlier this year and he just bought himself a brand new Macbook Air.

The hard drive is failing (get a lot of errors trying to copy his stuff off) so I am going to buy a 320GB 2.5" SATA drive from the local store today and had a question on installing Snow Leopard / Lion onto the newly purchased hard drive.

My brother doesn't have the installation discs that came with his Macbook and I was wondering what the best way to go about installing OSX onto this new hard drive? Is there something I can do with the old drive to install its image of OSX onto the new hard drive?

You can use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone the old hard drive to the new. You will need a data to usb adapter to connect the second hard drive. Or, if you delete any old user accounts, you might be able to clone the old hard drive to a usb stick, you would need at least a 16GB stick, if not 32GB. You can then either install the hard drive and clone the usb stick to the hard drive, or you can download Lion from the App store and make a USB installer for that. I would recommend doing a fresh install since the failing hard drive could have corrupted parts of the OS. Also, Carbon Copy Cloner might fail because the hard drive is failing. Personally, I would just order the $20 Snow leopard disc from Apple.

If you confirmed the drive is failing, and don't care about your bro's data, toss it, replace it, install using the SL install disk from Apple's website. $20 is a steal for such a great OS.

If you care about the data, get it off asap. Run a thorough scan of the HD, verify it's status. If good, just blow away the partition and reinstall using the $20 disk.

If you are impatient, you can buy the CD online, then show your local Apple store the email receipt. They will then either let you use their disk or just install it for you from their USB drive (this is what they did for me, amazing service).

You got a great deal, if you are getting the Macbook 4,2 for the price of a 320GB drive. Upgrade the RAM to 8GB for ~40$ and it will race. Also, I priced SSDs on Newegg, found an 60GB for around $80, and a 120GB for a little under $100. As the drive is transferrable to your next computer, it's an easy upgrade vector. Your RAM will not be so relevant in any future machines you get, except for selling on Craigslist.

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